Seth Meyers Launches His Late Night

Maybe the most unusual thing about Seth Meyers‘ debut as Late Night host, which taped at 30 Rock In New York Monday evening, was how un-unusual it was. David Letterman began the show as a new thing under the sun (or rather the moon). Conan O’Brien took over as a complete unknown. Jimmy Fallon was known from Saturday Night Live but took the show in a new direction–more joyous, less acerbic. And Meyers–Meyers is making the same transition as Fallon did, something he nodded at by opening his first show with a riff on Fallon’s “Thank You Notes” bit, thanking Fallon for turning over the show and promising to use it “only for completely original comedy pieces… starting now.” Nor was he radically changing the format of the talk show, a fact he also joked about: “I’m gonna shake stuff up and open this thing with a monologue!” The monologue was the sharpest part of Meyers’ first hour on the air (a departure from Fallon, whose monologue has never been his strength)–brisk, punctuated with self-deprecation (“Our first sorta bomb!,” he said, mock-delightedly, after one flat landing), and wide-rangingly topical. He riffed off Taco Bell’s new plan to serve breakfast (“perfect for those occasions when you wake up drunk”) and a proposed Georgia law to allow guns in church (“I believe it was Jesus who said: Everybody on the floor, put your wallets in this bag!”). You’d expect that from Meyers, given that Weekend Update is essentially a monologue in tag-team form. But he also told a charming personal story about being stuck on a weekend getaway with his wife, their small dog, and a car whose flat tire he was unable to fix, a story that played off his bookish nerd image: “It’s hard to feel macho holding a tiny dog while another man changes your wife’s tire.” And his banter with the deadpan Fred Armisen, leading Meyers’ band, suggested his former SNL castmate could have a substantial comedy role in the show going ahead. Beyond that, if Meyers is